FOUR BUSY DAYS AHEAD...

OMusic Friday; Burlesque Show rehearsals Saturday and Sunday; the Urban Grind show Saturday night; band recording Sunday morning; job interviews Monday and Tuesday. I feel like a four-day hole is being ripped out of my generally empty life.

That means today and part of tomorrow is the only time I’ve got left to do Empty Life things in. I have the rest of the recording equipment to move out into the garage studio (which is clean, now), the thongs to print, more jobs to apply for, two of April’s songs to record, a Derek Hines song to musicate and record, and the e.e. cummings poem (at least my part of it) to memorize for the Burlesque Show. Considering Mary Travers (of Peter, Paul and Mary) just passed on, it’d probably be good to mention in the Burlesque Show how much sleaziness Mary was able to inject into a children’s song: “Take me… for a ride… in your… car-car.”

The studio is an impressively funky little space now, quite comfortable to spend time in. I’ll have to video it. There are (surprisingly) places for everything, including the music computer I’m going to assemble out of the three used hulks I got at the college’s garage sale. Come winter, though, it will be hard to heat—it is uninsulated. And the spate of 90-degree weather we’re scheduled to get through the end of September won’t last. It is going to get cold.

Whipped up (it really doesn’t take much time) a draft certificate of appreciation for the local library to give to the businesses who donated to the Summer Reading Program. (And of course it looks good. I used to do this stuff for a living, and made money at it.) I’m doing it for the library for free, asking them to provide only the fancy paper; since these are going out to local businesses (rather a lot of them), I’d like it to bring in some business from them.

I offered to do the album covers and liner notes for Sara Charlton’s CD for free, too, for the same reason. (She plans on having it out in the spring.) One breaks in (or back in) to the graphic-design field the same way one does music—you do favors for people, and eventually it comes back. And you hope you don’t starve first.

The Portland Songwriters Assn. has become something of a mystery. I tried to join (I consider the $18 a major commitment, considering my lack of income), but my letter with the dues got returned—apparently their P.O. box is closed. No one has answered my e-mail, and I notice the last posts on their message board were back in January. (And of course, the open mike I went to last Sunday night wasn’t happening, either—the bartender at the Spare Room said it had stopped a couple months ago. But it’s still listed on the Portland Songwriters Assn. Website.) I wonder what happened to them? It’s like they’ve disappeared—victims of alien abduction, or something. I do have (from their Website) the edresses of a couple of folks who apparently used to be active in the group, and I’ll see if I get any response from them.

I finally did get something from the Neskowin Valley School—not an e-mail, or even a response to my attempts to contact them about the harvest Festival, but just a form-letter thingie announcing that the Harvest Festival is going to be Saturday, 10 October, the same day as the “Rocktoberfest.” That means I can’t do it—but it doesn’t seem like whoever’s in charge of the thing is particularly interested in having me perform there, anyway. The best I can assume is they haven’t contacted me because they’re too disorganized (I noticed they were disorganized last year)—but that assumes a perfection on my part that may not be justified. They may really just not want me back. And I’ll probably never know.

Joe